DDC-I, a leading supplier of software and professional services for mission- and safety-critical applications, today announced Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) 3.0 Conformance for its Deos safety-critical DO-178 real-time operating system and OpenArbor development tools running on ARM and x86 processors. The certification covers the FACE Technical Standard, Edition 3.0 Safety Base and Security Profiles for the Operating System Segment (OSS).

"The addition of ARM and the x86 to our existing PowerPC FACE offering gives DDC-I the most robust, multi-platform, multi-core, FACE conformant RTOS and development tool portfolio in the avionics industry," said Greg Rose, vice president of marketing and product management at DDC-I. "Avionics developers targeting ARM, PowerPC, and x86 processors now have a seamless FACE conformant RTOS platform that combines best-in-class performance and safety certifiability with enhanced application portability across the industry's most advanced avionics processors."

The Deos RTOS Platform for FACE Technical Standard 3.0 combines the time- and space-partitioned Deos RTOS and SafeMC multi-core technology with RTEMS (Real Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems), a mature, deterministic, open systems, hard real-time POSIX executive. Deos provides ARINC 653 APEX interfaces and multi-core scheduling. A para-virtualised implementation of RTEMS, which runs in a secure Deos partition, provides POSIX interfaces and scheduling. The integrated platform combines the strengths and pedigree of both ARINC 653 and POSIX RTOSs, providing the industry standard interfaces and feature set required for conformance with the FACE Technical Standard Safety Base and Security and Operating System Profiles, all in a time and space partitioned, hard-real-time, multi-core execution model.

Deos is a safety-critical embedded RTOS that employs patented cache partitioning, memory pools, and safe scheduling to deliver higher CPU utilization than any other certifiable safety-critical COTS RTOS on multi-core processors. First certified to DO-178 DAL A in 1998, Deos provides a FACE Safety Base Profile that features hard real-time response, time and space partitioning, and both ARINC-653 and POSIX interfaces.

SafeMC technology extends Deos' advanced capabilities to multiple cores, enabling developers of safety-critical systems to achieve best in class multi-core performance without compromising safety-critical task response and guaranteed execution time. SafeMC employs a bound multiprocessing (BMP) extension of the symmetric multiprocessing architecture (SMP), safe scheduling, and cache partitioning to minimize cross-core contention and interference patterns that affect the performance, safety criticality and certifiability of multi-core systems. These features enable avionics systems developers to address issues that could impact the safety, performance and integrity of a software airborne system executing on Multi-Core Processors (MCP), as specified by the Certification Authorities Software Team (CAST) in its Position Paper CAST-32A for Multi-core Processors.